“She’s gotta be the most sensitive spy I ever met,” Walburga said, and pulled out a chair.
“More of a warrior than a spy.”
“Sure, that’s what they are bred for, and another reason why the H3RMES became obsolete.”
“Why’s that?”
Walburga nodded at the girl lying on the bunk, and said, “Look what she did to you…”
“In about five seconds.”
“Exactly. Now, add another twenty children and hurl them at a spear of human infantry and what have you got?”
“A bloody mess,” I said, and picked at a smear of dirt on the display of the regeneration cylinder clamped around my thigh.
“A revolution,” Walburga said. “I just don’t understand why it hasn’t happened already.”
“Perhaps they don’t want to fight.”
Walburga’s cheeks dimpled, and then she laughed. “Where did LeRoy find you? In a museum?”
“A library, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Walburga studied me for a moment, and then pushed back her chair. “Wait here,” she said.
I looked over my shoulder at the girl as Walburga slipped through a hatch into what looked like a locker room. The girl’s snores were just audible, echoing beneath the bunk as Walburga opened and closed storage units with soft whines and thumps. I wondered at the Martian metabolism, and realised that my own was probably quite similar now that I had been augmented. I rubbed my hand over my ribbed stomach. I was hungry, again.
“There’s plenty of food in the mess,” Walburga said, when she returned. She dumped a pile of military fatigues on the table and dropped a pair of boots onto the floor. “The military left enough food supplements to last a full crew complement for a year.”
“I’ll have a look.”
“I can recommend the chicken. It’s about the only thing that tastes like it should.” She tapped the slim cuff around her wrist and nodded at another hatch at the end of the bunkroom. “I’m going to the bridge. I don’t want to miss our slot.” She picked at a spot of dirt on her cheek, and said, “Come on up when you’ve eaten.” She smiled as she walked away, and then switched to a series of short commands and instructions, to which H3RMES responded with pipe rattles, metal creaks, and the occasional bout of steam.
The ship was alive, perhaps more so than if it had an actual voice, an artificial intelligence like Synthea. I buried the thought, preferring instead the idea of a more organic intelligence, constructed around an infrastructure of metal, carbon, and gas. For all its machinery, engineering, bulkheads, hatches, ramps, and airlocks, the H3RMES actually breathed. I had seen Synthea smile. I had seen her bleed. But I couldn’t recall seeing her breathe, not once. The H3RMES then, by accident or design, lived, and, from the conversations it had with Walburga, it was sentient too.
Alive, not programmed. No algorithms to speak of.
How ironic, I thought, that on a mission to seek out life beyond the stars, the only life the explorers found was the one they unwittingly created to do the job.
“And what part will you play in LeRoy’s plans?”
A plug of air tumbled through the pipes above me, knocking to a familiar rhythm that might have beat out the words wait and see, or was just a random bout of metal indigestion. I remembered my stomach, pushed myself onto my feet, and shuffled into the canteen.
The girl stirred as I walked past her row of bunks, slipped her legs over the side, and padded into the canteen beside me. We worked through the storage units, tossing foil meal packets and crystal drinks onto the closest canteen table. When the hoard of food started to spill onto the floor, the girl chose a bench and sat astride it. She tugged at the ripcord of the closest packet and watched the contents swell and steam into insipid grey goo. She turned the packet within her hand and chose another one. I did the same, working through my side of the pile until I had found what looked like and smelled like chicken. I gave it the girl and looked for another.
We ate in silence, pausing only to glance around the canteen as the H3RMES rumbled into life, and we felt the tug of the artificial gravity on the soles of our feet as Walburga coaxed and cajoled the old ship out of the citysphere dock and into Earth’s lower atmosphere. There was a brief shudder followed by a kick when the H3RMES engaged the ion engines in each nacelle and charged into orbit.
Walburga’s voice crackled through hidden speakers. “We’re going to spin around the Earth for a bit. There’s a couple of kinks that need…”
A burst of steam purged the last part, and the girl chuckled.
“This ship is wabonga,” she said.
“Wabonga?”
“Trouble.” KIDTEN-0 smiled. “I like it.”
The girl giggled through a second bag of chicken as I chewed over another name, more etymology. Walburga was Old German, the ruler of the fortress. If LeRoy was the herald, then Walburga and the H3RMES could provide the lodgings for the army. The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that LeRoy was just in it for the money, and the girl was hardly a coincidence – a ten-year-old child with the fighting rank of zero.
But the ship was empty.
LeRoy said the Martians had their own secret fleet, and a hidden army of warrior children. They didn’t need the H3RMES, but they knew of the existence of the Shroud, and the splinter, the gap, the doorway into it.
I looked up when the girl stopped chewing.
“What?” I said.
“You think too loud.”
“You can hear my thoughts?”
“No,” she said, and nodded at my hands. “You’re tapping.”
I flattened my hand, felt the pulse through my fingers, and the thrum of the ship through the table. We had broken out of orbit.
“I ironed out the kinks,” Walburga said, as she walked into the canteen. She looked at the pile of food on the table, sat down beside the girl, and pressed her finger into the transparent bag of goo. “I never could stomach beef.”
“That’s beef?”
“Stroganoff, if you believe the hype.”
She licked her thumb and pressed it onto the surface of one of the crystallised drinks. The crystals fizzed, hardening on the outside to form a smooth wall that grew as the crystals expanded. A minute later and the drink bubbled in a ready-made glass. Walburga lifted it to her lips, drained the liquid and began to chew on the glass, dissolving pieces of fruit drink in her mouth.
“You’ve never been off-world, have you, Joe?”
“No,” I said.
“Lots to learn then.”
“Yes.”
“He’s been thinking,” the girl said.
I glanced at her, but she looked away, fishing through the pile of food packets for more chicken. She nodded as she found one, and then retreated to the opposite end of the table, curling an armful of crystal drinks along the surface.
“Kids, eh?” Walburga smiled and caught my eye. “What have you been thinking about, Joe?”
I tapped my fingers, and then made a show of looking around the canteen. “You said the H3RMES had food for a year.”
“That’s right.”
“And the hold can accommodate what? Two dropships?”
“And two shuttles, plus a command module or two.”
“But it’s empty.”
“Yes.”
“An empty ship with enough space and food for a few thousand people.”
“And a couple of ships, yes.” Walburga pressed a wet thumb onto another crystal puck. “Let’s hear it, Joe. What’s your theory?”
“These aren’t lodgings…”
“What?”
“The H3RMES. When LeRoy found you, he wasn’t looking for lodgings; he was looking for a lifeboat.”
Walburga took a sip of her drink. “Go on.”
“He told me we were going to enter the Shroud to plunder it. He needed me to find the knowledge worth stealing.”
“That sounds about right.”
“
Except it’s not true, is it? That’s just what he told the Valhalla Group, to get the money for the job, for my augments, the girl, you and the ship.”
“LeRoy is many things, Joe. He has many talents. I think you already know one of the things he is particularly good at.”
I did. I knew it from the moment I first met LeRoy H4RBINGER.
“Lying,” I said. “LeRoy is a liar.”
“An exceptionally good one.”
“And the Shroud? Does he even know where it is?”
Walburga finished her drink and stood up. “Come with me,” she said.
The girl looked up as we left, stuffed the crystal drinks into the leather pouch at the back of her belt, and followed us out of the canteen, past the bunks, and through the hatch leading to the bridge. The corridor was lit with soft brown lights, with an orange skirting light running along each side. Walburga stopped at the bottom rung of a ladder, unlocked a hatch in the bulkhead, and keyed a code into a pad to slide the door up so that we could enter the room behind it.
“This is one of the quiet places I mentioned,” Walburga said, and nodded for me to walk inside.
The first thing I noticed was the smell, a mix of ink and old bleach. I knew what I would see even before Walburga smoothed her palm across a slim pad and increased the lighting. The walls were shelves, and the shelves were lined with…
“Books,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“This is the library of a Shroud Navigator,” Walburga said, as she walked to the desk at the end of the long slim room. She curled her hand around a globe to one side of a pile of books and added another sphere of light, another layer of wonder. “This section deals with the known space, and this,” she said, and placed her hand on the metal shelf recessed into the opposite wall, “is Shroud space. The books on the desk link the two shelves, and the two systems, galaxies, whatever they are.”
“So that’s why I’m here,” I said. “LeRoy doesn’t know where the splinter is, does he?”
“Another lie” Walburga said, with a slow nod of her head. “If we are going to enter the Shroud, you’re going to have to find it first.”
PART 9
I opened the first book on the navigator’s desk, traced my fingers beneath the words, and realised the script was familiar, like the old European languages, suggesting a connection, or, at the very least, another part of the mystery surrounding the Shroud. What puzzled me more was LeRoy’s place in the mystery, and why he had been compelled to adopt the role he had, at great personal risk. He had convinced the shadowy corporations of the underworld to finance a mission to the Shroud, teasing them with tales of knowledge, wealth, and commodities, while actually outfitting a rescue mission. If the deep space prowler had in fact discovered the splinter to the Shroud, then its location died with them, the agents of Valhalla had seen to that.
Unless.
“How did LeRoy happen to find the library of a Shroud Navigator?”
“How does LeRoy find anything?” Walburga said. “He has a knack.”
“For lying,” I said, and closed the book. “He said a deep space prowler from one of the spheres discovered the splinter to the Shroud.”
“Yes?”
“And that the Valhalla Group destroyed the ship, the log, the crew – left no trace, effectively throwing the Shroud back into secrecy.” I waited for Walburga to say something. She folded her arms across her chest instead. “But that doesn’t explain this,” I said, and gestured at the books, the shelves, and the non-sphere items on the desk. “Is anything what it seems?”
KIDTEN-0 retreated to a dark corner of the library with a book in her hands, pretending to read as we both waited for Walburga to speak.
“This is a Shroud Navigator’s library,” Walburga said, “but you’re right, there was no deep space prowler.”
“But the Valhalla Group?”
“Attacked and destroyed a dummy ship – a shuttle from the hold.”
“And the crew?”
“The logs said they jettisoned in lifeboat pods a week before being boarded.”
“But there was no crew.”
“No.”
“And the logs?”
“I recorded them.”
I caught a glance from KIDTEN-0, saw her frown, and then I sat down at the desk, smoothing my fingers on the cover of the book.
“There’s a bigger picture,” Walburga said.
“Show me.”
She moved a pile of books from a chair, stacked them on a shelf and sat down, stuffing her hands into the deep cargo pockets of her trousers. She nodded at the girl, tilted her head to listen to the thrum of H3RMES’ engines vibrating through the ship, and then shrugged.
“LeRoy found me grubbing about in the dirt of one of the shipwreck sites outside the spheres. There’s a whole world beyond the spheres. Earth was not lost after the flooding and the storms. And, contrary to sphere-belief, balance was found without the need to ban anything. People died, others survived, communities were established, food grown – real food,” she said, with a nod in the direction of the canteen. “What pisses the corporations off is that we didn’t need them to survive. When they discovered that, they realised that drastic measures were needed to ensure their survival. So they built the spheres, admitted those whose profiles matched their needs. They left the free-thinkers to fend for themselves and took the dependent type, the easily manipulated – the born consumer.” Walburga laughed, and said, “The spheres are populated with weaklings, Joe, with the elite at the top looking down at them and laughing. But who’s laughing now, eh? When the spheres started to dump their garbage back into the world – my world – they gave us the technology we had been struggling to rebuild. Overnight, they boosted our development, and they gave us something that we had suppressed for so long.”
“Hope?”
Walburga shook her head. “No, Joe, they gave us ambition. We looked past the spheres and reached out for the stars.”
I rewound her words in my head, considered my own place in the sphere, and recognised the ease with which I had been manipulated, by the corporations who ensured my survival and fanned my interests in consumer goods, lifestyle accessories like the design features I had embedded in the walls of my apartment, the security door so easily bypassed. It wasn’t until I had sipped Martian beer, tasted spice Martian curry, been beaten to a pulp on imported Martian sand, that I realised there was anything else to wish for. The corporations ensured my survival, because I ensured theirs.
“LeRoy snuck out of the sphere once a week,” Walburga said. “He steered me in the direction of the better shipwrecks, and, when we found H3RMES, he taught me to fly.”
“Because of the Shroud? Did he know then?”
“He’s always known, Joe.”
“Because he is the navigator.”
“That’s right,” Walburga said, and smiled. “This is his library.”
“So he came from the Shroud?”
“He said he escaped, and that he needs to go back. Secret societies don’t like breaches. He cut that splinter in the shield with atomics, and then raced to the one place he knew they wouldn’t follow.”
“Earth.”
“Before the colonies.” Walburga nodded. “There’s no way the Shroud would risk exposing their world to Earth, so they let him go. He crashed here a long time ago. He’s older than you, Joe.”
“But why is he sending us back?”
“That’s the bigger picture. I’m not even sure he told me everything. In fact, I know he didn’t.” Walburga pulled her hands out of her pockets and stood up. She bit her lip and glanced at KIDTEN-0. “I’m pretty sure it has something to do with you, kid.”
“I’m a spy.”
“Exactly.”
“But LeRoy must know the coordinates back to the Shroud,” I said. “Why all the mystery, the books?”
“He purged the memory,” Walburga said. “Some kind of local lobotomy – a focused blast of energy. Don’t ask me how he did it; I
just know that he said the answer was here. He said he would send someone to find it. He sent you.”
She looked up at a blast of steam in the corridor outside the library, took a step outside and then reached for the ladder. I watched as she climbed out of sight and onto the bridge. The girl followed.
I turned the book on the desk, pushing at the corner with the tip of my finger. I could read. That didn’t make me a mathematician or an astronomer. I couldn’t read starcharts. But maybe I didn’t have to. Each of the people LeRoy had recruited, including himself, had a curious name, that when read not just spored provided another layer, a hidden depth. Something hidden within the name. LeRoy was the herald, Walburga the fortress, or, in this case, the lifeboat. KIDTEN-0 was the spy.
The spy.
In some contexts the spy was synonymous with an emissary. Was LeRoy sending the girl to entreat with the Shroud?
Why?
LeRoy had been planning this for years, putting pieces into play. Positioning them for just this moment. Again, the question was why?
Walburga called down from the bridge and stalled my thoughts.
“Incoming message from LeRoy,” she said. “Bring the holocom.”
I barely had time to appreciate the tangle of wires, circuits, and screens webbed together on the bridge of the H3RMES before Walburga held out her hand for the holocom. I gave it to her, and sat down to rest my leg after the short climb up the ladder. When LeRoy flickered into view I was reminded of Synthea – his whole body was projected onto the bridge, where he knelt with his ankles, wrists, and elbows bound with metal bracelets. He wore thick metal rings around his fingers and thumbs, and a thicker necklace that pressed against his throat.
“Cauterising bracelets,” Walburga said.
“That’s right,” LeRoy said. He cast a look to his left at someone or something we couldn’t see. “My associates want the coordinates, or they start removing bits of my body.”
“They start with the fingers,” Walburga said, and pointed at the rings.
A burst of crimson flashed around LeRoy’s wrist. He screamed as his right hand tumbled onto the floor and dissolved from view.
Enter the Shroud: In the Pursuit of Knowledge (The Shroud Discord Book 0) Page 6